OPEN THREAD: Because I love you and want you to be happy.
April 29, 2024
MY LATEST SUBSTACK ESSAY: Notes on the Asylum Where I Was Raised: In Which I Visit the Harvard Protests, Among Other Things.
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PLUTO WILL ALWAYS BE MY PLANET NINE: ‘Strongest Statistical Evidence Yet’ For Planet Nine Has Been Found, Scientist Says.
#NeverForget
THE NEW SPACE RACE: NASA still doesn’t understand root cause of Orion heat shield issue: “When we stitch it all together, we’ll either have flight rationale or we won’t.”
Well, that’s comforting.
SO YOU MEAN MILK DRINKERS PREFER ACTUAL MILK? More people prefer cow’s milk over plant-based milks, new Yahoo/YouGov poll finds. Here’s what nutritionists think about that.
MEANWHILE, IN GEORGIA:
Anti-Israel protesters tried to set up an encampment at the University of Georgia but it didn't last long after police arrested protesters who refused to leave for criminal trespassing.
Protesters can be seen screaming and resisting arrest while others shouted at the police. pic.twitter.com/NdC5Fqonc3
— Julio Rosas (@Julio_Rosas11) April 29, 2024
Criminal trespass is still a criminal act in some places.
CIVIL RIGHTS UPDATE: Georgia Governor Kemp Signs Law to Protect Financial Data of Gun Buyers.
“FAILURE MCFAILED STATE” SHOULD HAVE BEEN ONE OF THE INSCRIPTIONS: Gavin Newsom Asked the Internet to Submit Designs for a New Coin Honoring CA’s Innovations, and Hoo Boy…
THE HIGHER EDUCATION IMPLOSION: Go State U! Why pay a premium for a ‘polarizing’ degree? “He imagines a hiring manager looking at resumes from a recent graduate of Columbia and a recent graduate of the University of the North Carolina. The Columbia graduate, the manager thinks, is ‘more likely to be coddled, more likely to hold strong political opinions that will distract from their work’ and ‘more likely to have benefited from grade inflation and perhaps dubious admissions policies.'”
All is proceeding as Glenn has foreseen.
UPENDING THE VEEP STAKES: I’m a law professor and admittedly don’t have my finger of the pulse of the American public. Nevertheless, I can’t imagine that “She didn’t hesitate to kill her own pet dog when it was disobedient so think of what she will do to the deep state” is a politically winning slogan.
READER FAVORITE: HexClad Hybrid Nonstick 6-Piece Fry Pan Set. #CommissionEarned
THURSDAY IN INDIANA: 33 arrested at IU during protest in support of Palestine.
Today in New York:
It’s now been 20+ mins since 2 p.m. deadline to clear out the pro-Hamas encampment at Columbia has passed.
The university has not enforced the deadline and the pro-Hamas students remain. In fact, their numbers appear to have grown. pic.twitter.com/97KNPA81yy
— Townhall.com (@townhallcom) April 29, 2024
Developing but, needless to say, you get more of what you tolerate.
TWO WAPOs IN ONE!
Where are all the defenders of free speech to defend Chaya from WP's abuse? "LGBTQ activists" link her to threats and attacks and WP just runs that crap with zero evidence. That's meant to shut down her speech and all of you know this. https://t.co/4dnuqq9byb
— Karol Markowicz (@karol) April 28, 2024
C’mon – it’s 2024. Surely by now, Raichik knows that if you really want to get huge glowing profiles from the Washington Post, the way to do it is by threatening GOP congresspeople! WaPo Runs 5,000 Word Profile Of Man Imprisoned For Threatening Marjorie Taylor Greene.
In 2022, Josh Barro pondered: Are There Any Adults at the Washington Post? As Iowahawk noted around the same time, Barro was clearly asking the question rhetorically:
MARK JUDGE: Ron DeSantis wants to teach young people about communism. He should use rock ‘n’ roll.
Rock ‘n’ roll is an exciting, popular art form geared toward young people. It also has a proud (and largely ignored) history of anti-communism.
In their book, The Declaration of Independents: How Libertarian Politics Can Fix What’s Wrong with America, Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch, who both work for the libertarian outfit Reason, reveal the often hidden history of popular music as a weapon against totalitarianism. In the chapter “Keep on Rockin’ in the Free World,” they detail how the music helped defeat communism.
As Welch and Gillespie note, Vaclav Havel and the leaders of the 1960s revolt against communism in Czechoslovakia were deeply influenced by American rock and roll, particularly the band the Velvet Underground. A group of young Czech hippies formed the group the Plastic People of the Universe, named after a Frank Zappa lyric, and were soon banned by the government. A fan of the Rolling Stones, Havel saw and heard in rock and roll “a temperament, a nonconformist state of the spirit, an anti-establishment orientation, an aversion to philistines, and an interest in the wretch and humiliated.”
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In The Declaration of Independents, Welch and Gillespie note an incredible irony. In October 1989, a month before the Berlin Wall was torn down, rock and roll and hippie icon Neil Young released the album “Freedom.” Young meant the title ironically; the title track was about how the world was collapsing with Reagan-inspired greed and violence. But when the album was received in Central Europe, the newly free young masses took to it without irony.
It’s an exciting piece of history. DeSantis should add it to Florida’s new pro-freedom curriculum.
Heh, indeed. Read the whole thing.™
Flashback: Welcome to the PMRC, Neil Young.
IT’S CALLED “SCREAMS BEFORE SILENCE” AND IT’S THE MOST POWERFUL DOCUMENTARY I’VE SEEN SINCE I DON’T KNOW WHEN: Watch This… If You Dare… If You Can…
THE NEW SPACE RACE: NASA still doesn’t understand root cause of Orion heat shield issue.
NASA officials previously said it is unlikely they will need to make changes to the heat shield already installed on the Orion spacecraft for Artemis II, but haven’t ruled it out. A redesign or modifications to the Orion heat shield on Artemis II would probably delay the mission by at least a year.
The charred material began flying off the heat shield in the first phase of the skip reentry. Engineers are looking at how the skip reentry profile affected the performance of the Orion heat shield. NASA wants to understand how the Orion heat shield would perform during each of the possible reentry trajectories for Artemis II.
“What we have the analysis teams off doing is saying, ‘OK, independent of what the constraints are going to be, what can we tolerate?” Kshatriya said.
Once officials understand the cause of the heat shield charring, engineers will determine what kind of trajectory Artemis II needs to fly on reentry to minimize risk to the crew. Then, managers will look at building what NASA calls flight rationale. Essentially, this is a process of convincing themselves the spacecraft is safe to fly.
“When we stitch it all together, we’ll either have flight rationale or we won’t,” Kshatriya said.
The heat shield worked during Artemis I reentry but didn’t burn off as expected. SLS is stacked and ready for Artemis II and Starship is coming along…
GOOD NEWS FROM POLITICO!
Congress is killing Biden's cancer moonshot https://t.co/IPfLzGg23u
— POLITICO (@politico) April 29, 2024
I mean, I think they intend it as good news from their perspective, given their interest in keeping the population down:
The far right is so obsessed with making babies, they just held a whole conference about it.
Behind the scenes at the first “NatalCon” ⬇️https://t.co/kLHHmetUNr
— POLITICO (@politico) April 28, 2024
Incidentally, could pundits try to update their language from beyond the Cold War ’50s and ’60s? It’s Sputnik moments and moonshots all the way down!
JIM TREACHER: Today’s College Kids Get an “A” for “Antisemitism.”
In the seven years since a bunch of neo-Nazis in polo shirts stomped around Charlottesville with tiki torches, chanting “Blood and soil” and “Jews will not replace us” and other caca del toro, somehow it has become acceptable for young people to publicly call for the extermination of the Jews.
As always, the left’s refrain is: “It’s different when we do it!”
It’s happening all over the Ivy League. Our best and brightest, or so we’re told. Now they’re openly parroting antisemitic filth, and the dumber it is, the angrier they get.
Well, I’m getting pretty ticked off too.
It’s obvious that a lot of young people are living in their own little fantasy world. Some grownups are blaming TikTok for this antisemitic garbage spreading so fast, which sounds plausible. If the Chinese Communist Party is evil enough to unleash a deadly virus on the world, why would they balk at spreading the mind-virus known as antisemitism?
I don’t know what can be done to stop it, if the colleges and the local police aren’t willing to do anything. Some of them are finally starting to step up, so maybe that’ll stem the tide.
In the meantime, all I know how to do is make fun of these little idiots. So I think I’ll do that.
* * * * * * * *
Here’s another large child saying something silly:
In accordance with the prophecy:
VICTORIA TAFT: Media Reports Shocking Trump NYC Witness Intimidation—And Then We Busted Them. “MSNBC and Joy Reid, hang your head. Deadline, where’s the correction? And this prosecutor-pushed and media-amplified deception could land former President Trump in Rikers.”